Friday, July 31, 2009

I promised to make this post concise and hold it up to my usual humorous style. I failed miserably on both counts. If you were hoping for my usual funny posts, here’s a funny picture to hold you over until tomorrow.

In his post “Are American’s stupid” Jamie Jefford accused anyone of not supporting the Teabaggers of not understanding economics. The Teabagging parties actually follow two thoughts of economics. One that the corporate organizers support, and one that their followers believe. It’s like how PETA gets models to get naked (something I’m in favor of) to protest the wearing of fur, but they have a crazy belief that having pets is like having slaves (it’s not).

What most of the followers believe they are supporting:

The Austrian School of Economics: This Economic thought (It cannot be called a theory as it has no mechanism for Falsifiability) holds that basically government should take a hands off approach to the economy and let market cycles go through wild booms and busts which would be more frequent, more intense and shorter.

Ignoring that the Austrian School is not a valid Economic theory, it has two major moral problems (In Economics a theory can be valid meaning it works but immoral meaning it leads to human suffering ie: Discrimination Economics and Slavery).

The sharper (although shorter) downturns inflict massive suffering to the people affected. Under this school of thought people seeking entry-level jobs are simply ignored and asked not to make too much of a fuss as they curl up on the street corner to die. Having the Government stand by and do nothing as a quarter of their citizens die of starvation is not morally acceptable or a reality as starving masses tend to revolt.

The other moral hazard the Austrian School faces is that nature arbores a vacuum. If the Government takes a completely hands off role in business, it leads to the rule of “Might makes Right” where the larger businesses stifle competition through violence against small businesses.

The Austrian School also has two inherent weaknesses, (besides not being a theory and all). First, having to deal with frequent downturns makes consumers and entrepreneurs jumpy. It stifles economic risk taking as people are less likely to gamble with their savings if it means a bad decision could mean death.

The hands off approach leads to wealth accumulating in the hands of the very few. If you are one of the lucky ones who has wealth under this system you will be reluctant to change anything. So innovation is stifled.

While proponents of the Austrian School claim that making the economic system more dynamic makes for more innovation, history has shown the opposite happens.

What the Corporate Organizers want:

Fascism, Corruption, Cronyism, Corporatism better known as Supply-Side economics. The idea is if money is given to the rich they will invest it and it will benefit everyone.

The problem with this approach is Corporations hold to the line, “Never innovate until your competition forces you too.”

By favoring large corporations over small businesses they have no incentive to innovate so they invest quickly run out of “Real” things to invest in and make false economic bubbles like the housing market in the 80s and the past 7 years.

Even the modified Supply-Side economic policies of the Clinton administration which tried to create real bubbles by favoring the more innovative companies, first the Personal Computer boom then the Internet boom, ran into the problem of companies have no incentive to invest in the underling science to fuel these booms. Without the science behind them there cannot be technological innovations.

They also want a regressive tax system, I’ve written about the problems of that here.

Some things I support the Tea-Baggers on.

With a grab bag of complaints the Tea-Baggers have there are bound to be something I agree with them on. Here are a few.

Bringing the word Tea-Bagging onto the airwaves. I crack up every time I hear a reporter say it.

TARP- They didn’t protest when Bush started it, but now that President Obama is handling it they are all against it. But no matter who is handling it, it is a shitty idea.

The idea was to save the banks so investors don’t lose more of their money. They could then lend out more money and get the credit system working again.

The problem was our credit system was lending out millions of dollars for every “real” dollar the banks had in reserve. I wrote about that here.

The amount of “real” money that would need to be used to offset the major banks losses of imaginary money simply doesn’t exist. The federal government would have been better off raising the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation)’s guarantee to a couple of million, protecting the depositors “real” money and letting the banks fail.

If they had done that “real” money would flow into the banks that were solvent and these small and mid-sized banks would take over for the larger ones. The stock market would have taken a bigger hit, but it had already been knocked down to half of its former value.

Things they are protesting that make no sense.

They seem to be protesting getting a tax-cut. 95% of people are poised to get a tax-cut under President Obama. This cut is aimed to make the tax system more progressive leading to shallower recessions as I explained here.

They seem to be complaining about Healthcare Reform, which has to be done one way or another. It can be done through an orderly transition, or we can do nothing and watch the costs spiral out of control until Healthcare goes through Demand Destruction killing millions and tanking the economy again. As I wrote here.

As far as the expanding Federal Deficit they seem to be protesting the cures for it. Investment in Education pays off with a roughly 10 to 1 increase in GDP. Investments in Science have a direct payoff 8 to 1 and continue to payoff for years in the future. Think of the Aerospace Industry that was spawned by Jet research in WWII, the Internet which was spawned by military investment in DARPAnet and the PC Industry which was spawned by NASA’s investment in Microchips for the Space Program.

These are investments that will grow the GDP and the only way to cure the Deficit and start working on the national debt is to grow the GDP.

Without even getting into the crazier voices at the Tea-Bagging parties like the ones who shout out “Burn Books” I’ll stick by my claim that the Tea-baggers are stupid, for lack of a better term, for the total lack of Intellectual curiosity and the insistence to deny any and all facts that contradict their pre-conceived beliefs that they display.

This is a clarification of a few things that Jamie Jeffords took offense to, and mentioned in his post “Are Americans Stupid?” If this is the first time reading one of his posts, please ignore the spelling and grammar mistakes, they are not typical of his normal postings. I have a feeling he responded quickly and didn’t do his normal proof checking.

In my last post “Against Stupidity, The Gods Themselves Struggle in Vain” I talked about groups that I labeled “Stupid”.

I had thought I made myself clear when wrote that, I considered these groups stupid not “in the sense of diminished mental capacity, but that they are stupid by choice.”

Reading over the responses, and my actual statement I can see I need to clarify that a bit.

I am using the term “Stupid”, for lack of a better term, for the total lack of Intellectual curiosity and the insistence to deny any and all facts that contradict their pre-conceived beliefs that these groups display.

I’d also like to clarify that even though in that post the groups I identified The Birthers, The Tea-Baggers, Intelligent Design Supporters, and Climate Change Deniers are all part of the Conservative Movement, I’ve done the same to groups that are Liberal or so Bat-Shit crazy that no one will claim them.

I do believe I’ve been fairly even handed in my making fun of the stupid from all areas of the political spectrum.

To clarify I couple of things that Jamie said about my post “Frankly, you have to have zero understanding of economics…”

I have a BA in Economics from the Nations largest University; I’ll put my Universities Accreditation up against any college or University you care to name.

As far as me being anti-religious; it is true I don’t belong to an organized religion, I’m a Unitarian, but I didn’t attack the religious beliefs of anyone.

I’m against the Creationist’s trying to impose their view on the majority who doesn’t share that view, and their attempt to undermine valid scientific research but that is not an attack on their religion.

With those clarifications out of the way I will post a lengthier posts on how 3 of the groups I mentioned are ignoring reality.

I don’t think I need to show that with the Birthers, even though they make up 30% of the Republican Party.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

I was reminded of the above Freidrich von Schiller quote from 18th century when I was blog walking and read an attack on Bill Maher on Eye of Polyphemus.

Eye of Polyphemus is one of the few conservative blogs I can read. The author Jamie Jeffords does know how to use the shift key instead of writing in all caps unlike most of the other conservative sites I’ve visited and he does actually try to make sense out of the Republican talking points. But there is only so far you can polish a turd.

Plus he puts lots of pictures of scantily clad starlets on his blog.

The post was about if the United States is a stupid country, so I responded with a few examples of stupid political movements that highlight the stupid.

1) Birthers.

People who don’t believe that President Obama was born. These people make up nearly a third of the Republicans and they are bat-shit crazy. In an earlier post I compared them to both the Moon Hoax people and the South Park Underwear Gnomes.

Basically they have a lot in common with the Moon Hoax people in that they will ignore any and all evidence presented to them.

The premise behind the Tea-Bagging movement is they are protesting the fact that President Obama is shifting the $900 Billion that the Republicans had been giving out to corporations in no-bid contracts for non-existent services, into things like job programs and healthcare.

The idea seems to be that government should only rob the poor to help the wealthy, not help citizens for the common good.

Naturally when you get a group of people together to support such a wacky idea you are going to attract the super crazies, like the Neo-Nazis who look at these events as recruiting grounds and the people who want to burn books because they contain liberal things like facts.

These are people that think schools should throw out hundreds of years of logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence in favor of a scientific theory that relies on “Because I say so.” As its major point.

Confronted with overwhelming observable evidence of evolution isn’t a problem for these people they simply make up a different enemy, “Darwinists”.

They claim only Darwinists are allowed to teach in Universities, which is odd considering no Biology Professor that I’ve ever met has called themselves a “Darwinist”. One would think if Universities only hire “Darwinists” that you could find a “Darwinist” University Professor.

Now, if you want to claim that Universities hire science Professors that teach theories based on hundreds of years of logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence like, gravity, entropy, and evolution then they have a point as that is what science is.

4) Climate Change Deniers

These are people that think just because the world burns enough oil every day that if it were put into barrels and they were laid end to end they would circle the globe 2 and half times, it can’t have any impact on the environment.

They simply ignore the observable facts about climate change.A. The troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere is getting warmer, while the Stratosphere, the atmospheric layer above it is getting colder.

This is because carbon dioxide in the troposphere traps the heat and doesn’t allow it to rise into the stratosphere and then be dissipated into space.

B. The temperature is rising at the poles.As air warms at the equator it spreads out across the planet, as it does this the troposphere loses heat to the stratosphere making the temperature at the poles much cooler. (This is a gross simplification of the process but it illustrates the concept). Carbon Dioxide traps this heat so it transfers more efficiently to the poles.

On the planet and Moon in the solar system that have a runaway greenhouse effect, Venus and Titan there is little change in temperature from the equator to the poles. This is the tell-tale sign of the greenhouse effect.

At the time I wrote that the data showing that the poles are warming up faster than predicted was classified for National Security under the Bush Administration so I will raise my prediction to a 4-degree change over the next 100 years.

The fact that climate change is happening is impossible to deny.

It’s pretty clear what these groups all have in common, the ability to deny overwhelming evidence that is right in front of their face and claim any evidence is part of a liberal conspiracy, or as Stephen Colbert put it, “Part of the liberal bias of reality”.

The worst part of the stupidity of these groups is not that they are stupid in the sense of diminished mental capacity, but that they are stupid by choice. And since they are stupid by choice they feel that everyone around them should make the same choice and embrace the stupid.

The weird thing is they are against the “Intellectual elite” which should mean they would think being called the opposite “Stupid” is a compliment, but they get mad at being called that.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

I haven’t posted in a few days as I wrote two totally different types of articles in the past two days.Healthcare and Demand Destruction for Associated Content.It's about how the inaction on the Healthcare Crises could be worse than what the media is letting on.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

In order to be objective I’ve scoured the blogosphere looking for objections to Healthcare Reform and here is what I’ve come up with. I present them here in their best possible light.

Obama isn’t an American citizen.

Apparently, in a trial run of their scheme to fake the Moon Landings, NASA and the Illuminati faked Obama’s birth. Birthers claim Obama was born on a soundstage made to look like the Moon. As evidence they point to how his birth certificate clearly moves like a breeze is catching it.

NASA and the Illuminati faked this evidence 47 years ago so that in 2009 he would push through legislation to make healthcare affordable, which leads to step four: World Domination. As the bullet points below clearly illustrate.

Step 1: Fake Barack Obama’s birth.

Step 2: Have him win US Presidency in 2008 with the pledge to reform healthcare.

Step 3: ?

Step 4: World Domination.

It’s all so obvious.

If there is a Government Option, 119 Million people will leave bad private insurance plans.

This will happen because Private Industry is completely defenseless against the Free Market. There is no way for Private Insurers to stop denying people coverage and not allowing them to keep their coverage when they switch jobs. Of course there is no way for Private Insurers to cut costs in their billing procedures.

The idea of making the Health insurance companies compete is totally anti-free market.

Doctor’s offices will be like going to the DMV, giving the Milkman time to score with your wife.

Everyone knows the horror of having their drivers license renewed, having to go up to the counter, give them your old license and having your picture taken, then paying them.

In that 3-minute time span the Milkman will teleport through time from 1950 and seduce your wife into an afternoon quickie.

The whole Healthcare thing is just a rouse by the Milkman’s Union to score with your wife.

The horror.

There are 47 million crazy liberals wandering around.

The people who don’t have healthcare are just bums living off the backs of hard working people. The self-employed aren’t being turned away from Healthcare, it’s all in their heads. Why these people probably have health insurance right now but are too delusional to know it.

Betsy McCaughey, a Republican former lieutenant governor of New York, claims that the bill creates a "new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology." That will tell doctors what treatments to give patients.

It will do this by mandating Congress to build a time machine and send thugs back in time to the year 2004 and they will force President Bush to create that office. It’s true that the office was created by Bush in 2004 to help the health IT system to transmit information by updating hospital’s computer systems, but with the Democratic Congress having access to a time machine who knows what other sinister purposes they might use it for.

It’s a Soviet plot to turn the country Socialist and let Osama bin Laden sell yellow-cake uranium to unwed teen-age mothers while baby raping with Hitler and eating puppies.

It’s a threat so huge that we must all go to tea-bagging rallies and burn books.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

In the Healthcare “Debate” conservatives like to use an appeal to authority saying that the founding fathers would want us to have a system where only those working for large corporations can receive healthcare.

Being a Progressive I decided to look at the history of one of our founding fathers. (I realize a Progressive’s view on history, that history is a bunch of stuff that actually happened and was recorded at the time, and a Conservative’s view on history, that history is stuff they pull out of their ass to justify whatever nonsense they are spouting off at the time, are different but I’ll go with the actual truth just for the hell of it.)

As far as Ben Franklin’s views on medicine I’d have to say that as founder of the Pennsylvania Hospital that was established by the Pennsylvania Legislature to care for the sick-poor and insane who wander the streets of Philadelphia. He might be a little inclined to disagree that only people who work for large corporations are entitled to healthcare.

The quote he helped pick for the official seal “Take Care of Him and I will repay Thee” might give a clue as to his feeling on social responsibility.

But what can you expect from the founder of such socialist concepts as “The Post Office” and founded “Penn State” a state run university.

Looking at the history of the founding fathers it’s very hard to see how any of them would be for a system where a person’s healthcare makes them a slave to large corporations and denies healthcare to the self-employed and workers of small companies.

It’s even harder to see where any of them would favor a system that forces even those who have health insurance, to have everything they have worked for all their lives taken away with one bad illness.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

In the Healthcare debate the Republicans like to throw around the word socialism. (ok it’s not just in the Healthcare debate they like to throw that word around they use it for everything “Allowing Gays in the Military is Socialism”, “Not giving members of congress pay raises is socialism”, “Allowing companies to bid on government contracts is Socialism”. They use that word in debates like I use the phrase “Donkey Raping Shit Eater” when talking to a collection agency.) In this case they actually do have a point, it’s a silly point but a point, nonetheless.

Socialism - a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

By definition all Government Actions are Socialist policies. The military, roads, library, post office, and police are socialist entities. If you take the “ownership” part out of the definition and just look at the “control” part of Socialism, the current healthcare system is Socialist.

In the 1800’s we as a nation decided that food and healthcare couldn’t be a “buyer beware” type of sale. In our food supply it was decided that the government could make sure what was being sold was pure before customers attacked the milk companies for watering down their milk after they found a trout in the bottle.

The Government also monitors the quality of our healthcare, so trained professionals practice medicine and not the infamous “Snake-Oil Salesman”. The only place where the policy of Caveat emptor “Buyer Beware” is still allowed in healthcare is in the insurance part of it.

The public option doesn’t make the Healthcare part of the Healthcare industry any more or less socialist than it was before, it just offers doctors an option on how they get paid. With government option doctors will be paid less, but they know they will be paid. With the insurance companies doctors cross their fingers when they submit a bill and hope an insurance company bureaucrat doesn’t deny most of the work they’ve done.

Most doctors now prefer to work with Medicaid patients because it is less stressful to get 90% of the “going rate” than roll the dice and see what the insurance company will pay.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Monday July 20,2009 will mark the 40th anniversary of Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories. There are dozens of these floating around the internet, but most of them have serious flaws. But there is one Conspiracy Theory no one has challenged, I have seen this Theory on message boards that I post on, and on quick notes I type out to myself, so I will report on that one.

One of the big elements that people who believe we went to the moon, point at is the effects of one-sixth gravity on everything that was filmed, from the lunar shuffle the astronauts had to do to move around to the way dust fell when it was kicked up.

People have tried to recreate this effect on Earth and the only way to recreate it is to fly in a specially modified plane and that does large parabolic arcs simulating whatever gravity the pilot wants for about 25 seconds for every 65 seconds of flight.

NASA knew that people would get suspicious if the astronauts weren’t shown walking about in one-sixth gee so they built a huge soundstage roughly 4 miles wide to simulate the curvature of the Moon and built 3 huge jets with a roughly 20 mile wing span to simulate the Moon’s gravity.

They had identical sets on all three jets and had them take turns in the 25 seconds of one-sixth gee. The camera feed switched to whichever jet was simulating the Moon’s gravity at the time.

Now in order to fly these jets NASA needed huge engines shown here:

To keep the Russians from finding out about these planes, NASA needed to make them stealth and applied an early version of the stealth “paint” that military aircraft use today adding several 1000’s of tons to them.

With that much weight they wouldn’t be able to fly using normal jets so NASA needed to use He3 fusion rockets. The nearest source of He3 is the Moon.

So NASA secretly sent rockets to the Moon and built a Lunar Base with a few hundred people to mine He3 and bring it back to Earth to power the planes to fake the Moon Landing.

After Nixon canceled the Fake Lunar Landings in the 70’s there was no need for NASA’s lunar base to mine He3 and it was dismantled. But some evidence remains as seen here:

There were a few problems with this plan, like why didn’t the fake astronauts experience long-term radiation sickness that one would expect after being exposed to the cosmic rays of space?

NASA countered this problem by slowly exposing 24 out of the 33 astronauts that were supposed have gone to the Moon to powerful radiation giving them cataracts.

The astronauts who faked the space expeditions have become recluses afterward, taking low-profile jobs like: Senator, Authors, TV show hosts, and media consultants. People rarely see them doing tours where they might be questioned about their experiences and accidentally give away something about the conspiracy.

NASA also knew that the few scientists who weren’t in on the conspiracy would want to examine Moon Rocks. So they took roughly 1,000 kilograms of lunar rocks from their Lunar Base and thoroughly analyzed them. Knowing what lunar rocks were made of, they scoured Antarctica for lunar rocks and found 382 kilograms of lunar rocks (most of the lunar rocks that had landed on Earth). That’s why only 30 kilograms of lunar rocks have been collected in Antarctica in the forty years since, NASA took them all.

Elvis Presley found out about this conspiracy and NASA gave him the option of faking his own death or being killed. He naturally faked his own death on the toilet, as there is nothing undignified in that.

How many people were involved in this conspiracy?

Conservative Estimates point to at least 400,000 people being directly in on this conspiracy. The engineers who helped build the Saturn V and Lunar Lander, the international partners who helped monitor the radio transmissions, of course anyone who worked for NASA, the entire 10th mountain division who spent months combing the Antarctic for moon rocks in secret, the people that worked at NASA’s secret Lunar Base to mine the He3 for the secret jets.

Indirectly, all those people’s families and their families. So altogether several million people. Showing what type of agency NASA is to make such a vast conspiracy.

Never underestimate the power of NASA they anticipate everything that could possibly go wrong in a plan. BTW: NASA finally had good weather and were able to launch their $1.7 billion Space Shuttle Endeavour, it is unable to launch if it sprinkles cause engineers overlooked that fact that if water gets into the thrusters, it will freeze when it gets into space making the orbiter useless.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

According to Jack Hayford's Van Nuys, California Church on The Way, demons specialize in “particular sins, geographic locations, objects or age groups” and can take over even the most devote Christians.

Imagine getting the short straw in getting a job in your specialty, “man I studied my whole life to specialize in high school girl lesbianism in LA, and I’ve been assigned Tax Evasion in Utah.”

Beauty and Brains don’t have to be incompatible, and I do appreciate when a female uses her natural beauty to attain celebrity status and then carefully researches an issue and uses her status to raise awareness on an issue. Look at Angelina Jolie:

Ok, that was a pleasant 5 minutes, and a great excuse to stare at Angelina. Oh, and her work on raising awareness on refugees is admirable.

But then there are woman that use their celebrity status and looks to espouse the silliest ideas that if it weren’t for the fact that most of the people talking to them are too busy staring at their breasts they would be laughed off the stage. The number one chick who should shut up and put her mouth to a better use is Jenny McCarthy:

In the early stages of her career she was determined to give all males who were between the ages of 12 and 123 stronger forearm muscles. A noble goal in itself, I know she strengthened my left forearm considerably.

She moved on to show the world her range of funny faces:

Then she took on a cause, Autism. That seems like a laudable cause and would be if she took the time to research what the hell she was talking about, but instead she plunged head-first into it giving out advise that is actually more dangerous for kids than the chances of getting Autism.

For those of you that don’t know Autism is a mental condition makes the person’s brain tune to a completely different reality, in mild forms it can make a person totally unable to recognize social patterns, in severe forms it will leave the person unable to speak.

The causes of Autism is unknown but extensive research has shown that there is no link between Autism and Vaccines, Center for Disease Control

But that doesn’t stop Jenny from going on all the media outlets and saying that vaccines cause Autism. The worst part is people who listen to Jenny’s advice might end up aggravating a mild case of Autism into a full-blown case.

PERTUSSIS (WHOOPING COUGH) is a nasty disease that leaves the victim coughing out all the air in their lungs; it can go on for weeks. The victim can turn blue from lack of oxygen and pass out.

Vaccines have nearly wiped out this disease so emergency room doctors rarely see it and aren’t trained to deal with it.

If a parent follows Jenny’s advice and doesn’t have their child vaccinated they can get this disease and the lack of oxygen can cause brain damage, aggravating a mild form of Autism into a crippling one. And chances are the Emergency Room techs won’t have a clue as to what it is since vaccines have made it a very rare disease.

So Jenny please shut the fuck up! If you need something else to do with your mouth I can think of something, I’ll even dress up like Santa.

The next group of chicks that should do something better with their mouths, are the actresses that support PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), not People Eating Tasty Animals.

PETA sounds like a good cause, end killing animals for their fur and treat them as humanely. But the PETA people have taken it way to far, like this quote:

"Pet ownership is an abysmal situation brought about by human manipulation."

-Ingrid Newkirk, President, PETA, Washingtonian, August 1986

No it’s not. Cats have evolved with humans, as we starting gathering food and storing it in a permanent place, rats took advantage of that. Then Cats took advantage of having the Rats in a convenient place.

As we evolved together cats and humans developed a symbiotic relationship and cats even developed a language that humans react to. That’s why a purring cat puts people at ease.

The cat has evolved to experience a greater emotional bond with humans than with other cats, it’s stray cats that get emotionally deprived.

It’s a similar situation with dogs.

They also want to end ALL laboratory use of animals.

I agree with the Humane Society that their should be standards to keep pain and suffering of lab animals down to a minimum and oversight to see if a test needs to be done on an lab animal, but in the end animal testing is necessary to help both humans and animals.

So for the PETA celebrities that go nude rather than wear fur, while you’re nude I’ll put something in your mouth to keep you from repeating the propaganda from these misguided fucks.

BTW: If you are legitimately concerned about animal welfare the ASPCA and Humane Society are good organizations with rational thinking.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

I love getting comments, especially from people who link to website. So when Tony commented that he liked me sharing information in my Post “Stuff I’ve missed” where I covered everything from the Falcon I space launch to Sarah Palin’s quitting as Governor of Alaska, I naturally wondered two things.

Which issue inspired the comment, and who Tony was. So I looked at the link they left. London Escorts (barely suitable for work aka: BSFW). No nudity but if you’re flying out to England with the company credit card and your boss sees you pulling up that site, accounting might take a very close look at your expense account.

The site didn’t have a picture of a Tony so I assumed it’s an alias and picked this picture to represent the mysterious Tony:

Then I got wondering which issue would Escorts in London be most concerned with?

Space Travel?

That would be interesting, SpaceX says they should be able to offer trips into Low Earth Orbit for $40 million on their Falcon 9 heavy. If I had $40 million laying around an Escort Service that would let me join the 100 mile high club would be the way to go. Sex in zero gee sound fantastic.

Community College Funding?

I suppose an English Lass might be interested in the US college funding system, if only to get a smug laugh. From what I understand, University on England is state funded with only charges for voluntary programs like gym.

Healthcare Reform

I know people in England are following our healthcare debate if only because their healthcare system is mentioned all the time in the debate.

Here is what everyone needs to know about the difference between English Healthcare and American Healthcare. The English Healthcare model is considered one of the worst nationally run Healthcare systems and it ranks nearly twenty countries ahead of us as far as service.

The English also spend a lot less per capita on healthcare than the US.

And their Auto Insurance is a lot cheaper.

Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin was a savior to the Democratic Party. A key battleground demographic in the last few elections being White Woman.

Younger Woman were overwhelmingly Democratic until they had kids, then the fear mongering of the Republicans played on their protective instincts.

When Sarah Palin took the national stage no mother wanted her to be a role model for their daughter. So moms across the country turned Democratic.

However, I’m not sure that English Escorts would care that 27% of Americans like the bubble-headed twitter quitter.

Maybe they need someone to point to and say, “Hey at least I used my looks to do something better than be a national laughing stock.”

That last line is not sarcastic, any job dealing with customers is tough and I respect the work that Escorts and other women in the sex industry do.

So Tony, next time you stop by could you clear up which topic you were interested in.

It’s been a few days since I posted as I have been dealing with Bank of America trying to get my house out of foreclosure.

I’ve racked up a total of 6 hours on the phone with them trying to get them to answer 3 very simple questions.1) Why didn’t they fulfill their obligations under the Mortgage Agreement?2) Why are they lying to me?3) Why are they breaking the law?

For some reason they don’t seem to want to answer these questions. They just keep passing me off to someone else. Their lawyer is supposed to call me maybe she can answer my questions.

Even though the Falcon I isn’t technologically superior to the Atlas V it does offer a competing way to get objects into space. At $8 million per ½ ton flight it is the cheapest way to get into space.

Also SpaceX can start making these expendable rocket launches on a semi-routine basis freeing up resources for their work on the Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 heavy. These are the rockets that SpaceX hopes to use to take over the servicing of the ISS after the Shuttle is discontinued.

If the Falcon 9 is successful it will free up NASA to work on the Orion/Constellation Project and return humans to Moon.

Hopefully NASA can contract out all their Low Earth Orbit duties to private companies like SpaceX and turn their energies back to what they are good at pushing the envelope of space technology and expand the human frontier.

Bad News:

The International Space Station the massive spacecraft that is as big as a football field, cost $100 billion to build and is a key component to many private space companies long term plans, is scheduled to be scrapped in 2016.

It took over a decade to build the thing and now it’s going to be junked in less than half that time. That doesn’t make much sense to me.

Finally a good proposal to get some long-term benefit out of the Great Depression 2.0.

With unemployment nearing 10% it is damn near impossible for someone fresh out of high school to get a job. Let’s face it if you were the manager of a restaurant and you had two applicants for a waiter. One fresh out of high school with no work experience and one former Securities Broker who ran a multi-million company who would you hire?

By sending as many high school graduates through community college as possible right now it will ease the demand for entry level jobs giving the vastly over qualified workers a way to survive until the economy picks back up.

In 2 years when these students come out of college with their Associates Degrees, America will have better skilled workforce that can seriously compete with other nations.

It’s a solution that gives both short term relief and long term benefit.

Bad News:

This proposal doesn’t do anything to fix the Educational/Banking Complex that has turned into a vampire sucking the benefits of higher education out of the average American worker.

Nothing is being done about the fact that the Higher Education System rewards banks that default graduates on their student loans, even if the graduate is paying back the loan as promised.

Good News:

Healthcare reform with a public option, which 72% of Americans want, is moving forward.

Bad News:

7 Democrats, Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Mary Landrieu, Dianne Feinstein, Jeff Bingaman, and Blanche Lincoln, are gladly taking some of the $1.4 million a day that Insurance companies are using to fight the public option.

The stupidest argument against the public option (you are welcome to disagree as there are a lot of stupid arguments against it) is that if people making more than $500,000 a year are taxed 1% to cover the cost they will take their ball and leave the country.

Oh no, What will America do without the people who gave us invaluable products like Default Credit Swaps, and Sub-prime Mortgage Backed Securities?

Good News:

Sarah Palin resigned as Governor so she can help candidates that share her lunatic vision for America. Now we have a quick way to Identify the wackos.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

I thought I was able to make very concise stories, I’ve written a few flash fiction stories and even got paid for one.

But recently Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy turned me on to an extreme writing challenge.

Ficly is a writers site with a twist, all stories (and comments) must be 1049 characters or less. Maybe my buddy Ricky A Pursley wouldn’t find that a challenge, but for the rest of us it is.

For Example, I’ve had the idea for a middle of a story floating around in my head for a while. I never wrote it up because it needed a beginning and an end. I thought this would be a perfect place to put it, as even without a beginning and an end it is a complete thought. So I wrote it up, looked through it trimmed it down to only the barest parts and this is what I got.

A New Dimension in Home Office Design

“This is what you’ve been working on?” His wife asked.

“I told you I was redecorating my Home Office.”

“But I thought you were just going to throw up some Oak Paneling, not this…” She gestured at his creation.

“It’s a tesseract, A 3 Dimensional representation of a 4 Dimensional Hypercube.”

“There’s barely enough room for you to sit.”

“The perfect amount of room, and all the 3 Dimensional cubes that make up the outside of the hypercube slide in so everything is at arms length.”

“Why aren’t the lights on?”

“I had to give this room it’s own breaker box.” He told her. “A hi-tech office like this needs hi-tech, I have computers in outside cubes running windows, Linux, Unix, Mac, and a few OS things I’ve never heard of.”

“How many?”

“63 in all. And it’s own A/C unit of course. Hit that switch I’ll show you what it can do.”

“I’m not impressed?” She said after turning on the power and nothing happened.

“Something’s wrong.” He said.

“Honey where did the house go?” She was staring at a black void outside the door where the rest of the house had been.

“I must have wired something wrong and somehow turned this room into a real hypercube and we’ve been pushed into the fourth dimension.”

“I told you to go with the Oak Paneling, but you never listen to me, now look what you’ve done.”

Then I looked at the number of characters and found out I had to cut nearly a third out.

As if trying to write a story in 1049 characters wasn’t enough of a challenge, they have challenges, they throw out an idea and ask people to write a story around it.

If you are really a glutton for punishment, and I know I am, you can write prequels and sequels to other peoples work. It’s tough getting someone else’s tone right without imitating all under 1049 characters.

So if you are up for the challenge leave me a note and I’ll check out your work.

BTW: I have not received compensation from Ficly or any other website that I have reviewed on Project Savior -hint- not that I’m above that, but no one has asked. -/hint-

Monday, July 6, 2009

Have you ever read a creepy horror story that made you wonder what kind of person has such sick and twisted thoughts going through their heads.

That recently happened to me when Alienskins Magazine accepted my flash fiction story “A Home to Die For”. It had been awhile since I wrote it and after it was accepted I had to reread it, it’s a little creepy, basically think what Master Carpenter Norm Abrams would be like if he were also a deranged serial killer.

It’s very strange rereading your own work and getting worried about the mental state of the author, when you know the author was yourself.

I guess we all have our Dark Sides and by tapping into mine I was able to write an enjoyable little story, much better than tapping into my Dark Side and going on a tri-state murder spree.

You can read it for yourself when it comes out in the August/September 2009 Anniversary Issue of AlienSkin Magazine.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

The Republicans have come up with a new strategy recently, and that is to try and get their supporters to avoid the US Census.

On many Progressive Blogs the question has come up, Why?

Why would they pursue a strategy that gets them purposely underrepresented?

It’s all about having something to explain why their views still get airtime.

They are currently the small minority party, 58-40 in the Senate, and only 20% of the American people identify themselves as Republican, yet they get 8 times as much airtime as the Democrats on TV.

Their main newspaper the Weekly Standard has a readership of 80,000 as opposed to The Huffington Post with a viewership of millions. Yet the views expressed in the Weekly Standard get more coverage in the Mainstream Media.

Their big fear is the census will show that their base the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) are now a minority in the country.

Back in the 80s they had some claim that evangelicals like the Moral Majority should have some say in the country as some 60% of America belonged to White Protestant Churches. (Of course the evangelicals only made up a small percentage of that group, but why let the truth get in the way of a silly argument.)

The latest Poll numbers have Protestants making up approximately 51% of America. 10% of that is made up of Black Churches and for some reason Black tend not to support policies that legalize discrimination.

These poll numbers have been pretty consistent and the number of Protestants in America has been dropping at a rate of almost 1% per year over the last decade.

No one has a crystal ball and can say exactly what percentage the 2010 census will show but even if the amount of Protestants hasn’t slid and the 2010 census shows that the number is 50% plus a small fraction of a percent the Argument that “Christian” policies should be put into effect to please the majority becomes silly when the “majority” is a majority by less than 1%.

It also makes it hard for people like Dobson to demand something because Christians “Meaning only Protestants” are the majority when some branches of Protestants like Unitarians are 100% opposed to what he says. If you take their 2% out of the Protestant mix you are left with 48-49% (not a majority).

After the next census the argument that the Protestant 10 commandments should be taught in school to please the majority won’t hold up as less than 49% of Americans are part of a religion that recognizes the Protestant version. (Catholics and Jews have their own and Unitarians don’t believe god takes time out of his busy schedule to have individual talks with people, therefore no personal delivery of the 10 commandments).

Likewise, Prayer in school is a dead issue.

To counter the fact that the reality is that America no longer has a Protestant majority, they will try to get their base to not be part of the census, that way they can say they were underrepresented.

It’s all a strategy so they can hold their fingers in their ears and say “La-La-La-La I can’t hear you.” For the next 10 years. Instead of adapting to the new reality and embracing the separation of church and state mentioned in the 1st amendment.

I can’t wait to see the strategy for ignoring reality after the 2020 census, when Protestants are expected to be less than 40%.

About Your Host

I am slowly combining my two personalities Project Savior, known on the internet for writing comments and posts and Darrell B. Nelson the semi-professional author who has had his work published in Ray Gun Revival, Distant Worlds, AlienSkin Magazine, Bewildering Stories, Cynic Magazine and the author of the collection of short stories “I Killed the Man That Wasn't There”.
Feel free to laugh with me, or at me, as I merge these two personalities in a whole being. Feel free to email me at project.savior (at) yahoo (period) com.